BURIED IN THE PAST
Pollard & Toye Investigations
Book Seven
Elizabeth Lemarchand
To S.M.G.R. of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford
and
J.A.Y. of the University of Exeter
whose erudition sparked off this book.
Table of Contents
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Part Two
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Epilogue
ALSO IN THE POLLARD & TOYE INVESTIGATIONS SERIES
Part One
Chapter 1
The Editor
The Corbury Courier
6 November
Dear Sir,
As the Bible says, a thousand years are but as yesterday. With the Millenary coming on fast, Corbury hearts beat with the same pride as their forefathers’ did, when good King Edgar made us a free borough and gave us a site for St Gundryth’s Church where it stands to this day.
I take up my pen, sir, to urge on the Council, as you keep doing in the paper, to celebrate our Millenary in a manner befitting past, present and future.
Long live the Ancient Borough of Corbury!
Your obedient servant, Horace J. Rudd
6, Beaconsfield Road, Corbury.
The Corbury Courier came out on Fridays. While he was shaving, Horace Rudd heard the front gate squeak, and a muffled thud on the mat. He ran downstairs, his face soaped, and scooped up the newspapers. In the kitchen he threw aside the Express and spread out the Courier on the unoccupied end of the table. With hands that fumbled slightly he turned to the section headed ‘What Our Readers Think’. Incredulous delight swept over him as he saw his letter under the sub-heading ‘Roll on, Millenary Year’. He read through it rapidly, then more slowly, awed by this incontrovertible evidence that he was one of the paper’s Thinking Readers.
‘Winnie!’ he shouted in the direction of the back kitchen. ‘They’ve put it in!’
A roundabout figure in bedroom slippers appeared in the doorway, home in on a waft of frying bacon.
‘Going to the shop like you are?’ hiswife enquired. ‘Give us a look.’
Horace Rudd showed her the Courier, jabbing at his letter with a finger. He watched her lips move as she read it.
‘They’ll offer you a job on the paper, I shouldn’t wonder,’ she commented, concealing her pride under irony. ‘All the same maybe you’d better finish out the week down at the shop before you asks for your cards. Bacon’s just gone into the pan, if you want any breakfast.’
He gave her a resounding slap on the bottom with the Courier, and ran up the stairs two steps at a time.
Half an hour later he left the house walking jauntily, a dapper little figure with bright, dark eyes and strands of carefully arranged thinning hair. His workplace, Value Foods Limited, a supermarket in the High Street, was a bare ten minutes’ walk. Corbury was still small and compact, though expanding. The old town — the parish church and the select residential area — was on the crest of the downland scarp. Later development had crept down a gently-sloping spur into the vale below. Value Foods was conveniently situated between the two worlds. This morning Horace Rudd could not get to work soon enough, exhilarated at the prospect of a still further enhanced status in the eyes of staff and customers. Life was unexpectedly branching out for him: earlier in the year he had been mentioned in the Courier as a volunteer helper in the excavation of a Roman villa near the church.
When Sir Miles LeWarne of Edgehill Court came down to breakfast, he found the folded Times and Courier by his place. An elderly widower, wealth and local status enabled him to maintain a fair standard of gracious living. He read the news items on the front page of The Times over the excellent coffee and crisp toast provided by Maggie Marsh, his housekeeper, and then carried off both papers to his study. He had plenty of leisure for them now. He was an active eighty-one, and sometimes the days seemed long. He had come off the Bench under the new age-limit rule and had reluctantly resigned from his many committees in the course of the past decade, deciding that it was better to remove oneself than to dodder on, keeping out a younger man. The LeWarnes, who had been at Edgehill Court for over three centuries, were a Corbury tradition, however, and his many invitations to public functions still kept him in touch.
Sir Miles settled himself in his favourite chair drawn into a patch of sunshine, got his after-breakfast pipe going nicely, and opened the Courier. Because of a lifetime’s association with the town, almost every item in it was meaningful to him. Eventually he arrived at Horace Rudd’s letter, and a smile lit up his tired old face with its big nose and mouth, and blue eyes under bushy white eyebrows. He remembered Horace as an out-at-elbows errand boy when old Fairbrother owned the shop, and a damn sight better shop it was in those days, too. He found it heart-warming that the older generation, at any rate, had pride in their town.
At eleven o’clock, Maggie Marsh brought in his Bovril and biscuits. She urged a scarf, as well as an overcoat, for the turn in the garden which he took before lunch on fine mornings. It was sharp, she told him, in spite of the sunshine. Anxious care of him showed in her honest, frog-like face under a frizzled fringe. Sir Miles suppressed his irritation at being fussed over, and promised to comply.
‘Everything under control for Mr and Mrs Roger tomorrow?’ he asked, to turn the conversation.
‘Everything, sir. Mrs Hayes is doing out the bedroom and dressing room now, and Finch is sending up a nice shoulder of lamb first thing, with a brace of pheasants for Sunday lunch, like you said.’
‘Splendid,’ he replied, and began to sip the Bovril — a hint to her to withdraw.
When she had gone his eyes wandered to the photographs of his wife, who had died ten years earlier, and of his son and only child, shot down while piloting a bomber over Germany in the last war. As so often, he tried to picture the family circle, augmented by grandchildren, which might have surrounded him now. It troubled him that this imaginative exercise seemed to become more difficult as the years slipped by. He turned for reassurance to the wedding photographs of Roger LeWarne, his great-nephew and heir. A dear boy, Roger, and he’d married a fine girl. At any rate there was a LeWarne to carry on the title, and keep up the old place. Time they were making a start on a family, though.
Presently, overcoated and with a white scarf to protect his throat, Sir Miles stepped out on to the terrace. It was a still morning of late autumn, with a pale blue sky and fragile sunlight. Walking with a stick and an old man’s caution, he descended to the rose garden on the lower terrace. There were still a few belated blooms. He took out a pocket knife and cut a bud from a persistent Frensham for a buttonhole, re-creating the fine upstanding chap that he had been, not all that long ago.
Going slowly up the steps to the first terrace again, he walked to its far end, and stood looking across to the town. Between Edgehill Court and Corbury the scarp curved inwards, forming a shallow bay. As he gazed, Sir Miles picked out buildings he knew well: St Gundryth’s Church with its fine perpendicular tower, the scheduled Georgian houses of Edge Crescent, the waterfall of bricks and mortar tumbling down the scarp to the regimented modern layout in the vale. Straight as a ruled line, the road which the Roman legionaries had made came out of the distance, cutting across the flat ground to the town, ascending the spur as Corbury High Street, and vanishing past the church.
What an eye for the lie of the land those fellows had, Sir Miles thought, as he turned towards his front door.
St
anton & Mundy, Corbury solicitors, took in the Courier, its contents often being relevant to their clients’ affairs. Gerald Stanton, senior partner and Town Clerk, sat studying the advertisements of forthcoming property sales over his elevenses. He then skimmed through the rest of the paper. The words ‘Roll on, Millenary Year’ caught his eye, and he read Horace Rudd’s letter with a grin. Had it ever occurred to the chap that the befitting celebrations he was clamouring for would have to be paid for by somebody? Gerald Stanton congratulated himself on having persuaded the Borough Council to open a Millenary Fund, in the hope of being able to avoid levying a special rate. It had got off to a flying start with a blockbuster of a thousand pounds from old Miles LeWarne, too. And there was the chance that another of his inspirations might pay off: the invitation to the Mayor of Corbury, U.S.A., to attend the celebrations.
The firm’s office was at the top of the High Street. Gerald Stanton, a tall, dark man in his early forties, got up to deposit his coffee tray on a side table and stood looking out of the window. A continuous stream of traffic was entering and leaving the town by the long, straight road across the vale: a satisfactory sight. Stanton was a member of a small local syndicate, recently formed to acquire and modernise a dreary little commercial hotel with an eye to the increasing tourist industry of the area. Subconsciously, thoughts of finance directed his attention to the buildings of Plowman’s Pottery, a family business owned by his brother-in-law. As he frowned, the buzzer on his desk sounded.
‘Mr Catwick’s here, Mr Stanton,’ his secretary informed him.
‘Show him in,’ he replied, his mind instantly switching to the pros and cons of Mr Catwick buying the freehold of his house.
Mr Catwick was followed by another client who was facing a charge of driving without due care and attention, and it was just on one o’clock when Gerald Stanton left the office to go home to lunch. His home was in the status-conferring Edge Crescent, whose beautifully-proportioned houses in mellow brick Sir Miles LeWarne had admired earlier that morning. Number One had been a wedding present to the young couple from his father-in-law, the late James Plowman. Shirley Plowman had been fully aware that she was marrying up, out of trade into the professional classes. Over the years she had applied her intelligence and inherited business acumen to harmonising the interior of her new home with its elegant exterior. The result was admirable, and today, as almost always, Gerald reacted with pleasure as he came in. He sensed at once, however, that something had ruffled Shirley.
‘Anything come unstuck?’ he enquired presently over lamb cutlets. ‘You look a bit hipped.’
Shirley Stanton, a few years younger than her husband, was a well-turned-out pale woman, with straw-coloured hair swept back into a bun. Fine, but rather challenging blue-grey eyes and a slightly square jaw gave her face the emphasis which its colouring lacked. At this moment there were faint red patches on her cheekbones.
‘Sorry it’s so obvious,’ she said. ‘I always feel you’re entitled to a peaceful lunch hour. It’s Mark, of course. I looked in at the Pottery this morning. The year’s profits are going to be down by at least eight per cent.’
Gerald raised his eyebrows.
‘What did Mark have to say about it — if anything?’
‘He started off by blaming everything and everybody else, and ended up by losing his temper and shouting at me. Of course, to be fair, one’s got to admit that it’s been a difficult year. A late, cold spring always means a reduced demand for the horticultural lines, and it was a poorish August — fewer people around, and less to spend because of strikes. Wages and fuel and whatever, all up. I admit all that. It’s the way he just sits down under it, instead of looking ahead and trying to develop new lines and find ways of cutting costs, that maddens me. For instance, I just can’t get him to see that tourist demand for the better stuff is on the increase. He’s taking the usual line that it would be unsound to get a bank loan for a second electric kiln if sales have fallen, and anyway skilled labour’s short.’
Gerald helped himself to cheese and biscuits.
‘I suppose you made your usual offer?’
‘Certainly I did. In fact, I improved on it. I said I’d advance the money for the kiln at half the Bank’s interest, with repayment over the next three years, provided that I came in over all major policy decisions. He simply blew up, and said either he’d run the Pottery himself, or sell up for what he could get. There’s nothing to stop him, you know.’
‘It’s not the slightest use my having another go at talking to him, I suppose?’
Shirley shook her head decidedly.
‘None whatever. He’d only dig in.’
‘What I shall never be able to understand is why your old man didn’t leave you a share in the business, instead of just a share of the profits. He must have realised that you’ve got about ten times Mark’s grip.’
‘He’d never have done that. The Pottery has always come down from father to eldest son. In some ways Father and Mark have a lot in common. You know — “as it was in the beginning” etc. But of course profits were easier to come by in Father’s day, so he made out nicely all the same.’
‘On a more cheerful note,’ Gerald said, ‘we’ve heard sub rosa that full planning permission has come through for the Royal Oak.’
‘That’s something to be thankful for, anyway.’
They began to discuss the scheme for the modernisation of the hotel.
As well as the Pottery, Mark Plowman had inherited his father’s house in Edge Crescent, and lived there with his wife Monica, and only child Belinda, a few doors from the Stantons. Monica Plowman, now in her late thirties, was a kind-hearted, unambitious woman, inclined to be lazy, and engrossed by her home and family and a small circle of personal friends. Neither she nor her husband had seen any reason to refurnish their new home when they moved in fifteen years earlier, and its rooms presented an oddly dated appearance. Apart from modernisation of the kitchen premises, and the contemporary decor of Belinda’s bedsitter, executed by herself, little had changed since Mark’s childhood.
Belinda was now eighteen, artistically gifted, and at present taking a course in industrial design at the Warhampton College of Art. Her psychological make-up combined her aunt’s ability and purpose with her mother’s capacity for sympathy, and in consequence a fair measure of communication between herself and her parents had been maintained as she grew up. Gathering from a rather woolly letter from her mother that things were going badly at the Pottery, she had unexpectedly come home for the weekend, announcing to her fellow students that she felt like a spot of lushness, and was in need of a cash handout.
After a large tea in front of a blazing log fire she sprawled in an armchair, in what was still called the drawing room. Against its cream walls and chintzes she struck an incongruous note in scruffy blue jeans and a purple sweater, one leg dangling over an arm of the chair. Her fair hair was worn long and straight, and tumbled in confusion over her shoulders. It framed a face broad at the cheekbones, with a good brow and the Plowman blue-grey eyes.
‘Aunt Shirley is a bitch,’ she commented, as her mother’s account of the morning’s encounter between Mark and Shirley at the Pottery came to an end. ‘But all the same, Mummy, I do think Pop could get up and go a bit more, you know. This kiln thing: you’ve simply got to take chances if you want to turn over lolly these days.’
‘Everything to do with running a business is dreadfully difficult now,’ Monica replied, having firmly grasped at least this one economic fact, even if unable to elucidate it. ‘Everything is so uncertain, you see. Your father feels he can’t possibly launch out unless he can see his way ahead. He seems very worried, I’m afraid.’
Belinda’s gaze wandered round the room, and rested on family photographs in silver frames. She began to speculate about life in the days when people took it for granted that things would go on in the same way for ever.
‘Mummy, I’ve seen Bernard Lister,’ she said, through an association of ideas.
‘You mean your father’s cousin?’ she asked in an astonished tone.
‘Who else? Bernard Lister, M.A., B.Litt., F.R.Hist.S., Lecturer in Medieval History at the University of Warhampton. I happened to see on a poster that he was giving a public lecture, and thought I’d go along to have a look at him.’
‘I’ve never met him,’ her mother replied, suppressing obvious curiosity. ‘He’d broken with the family before your father and I knew each other.’
‘He’s small and pale—looks clever and unathletic. D’you know,’ Belinda went on meditatively, ‘I don’t blame him a bit for walking out. He must have had a perfectly bloody time with Aunt Shirley and Pop when they were all kids. He’d have been a hopeless misfit in the Plowman set-up.’
‘I think he behaved disgracefully,’ Monica said with unusual vigour. ‘Your grandparents took him in when he was a friendless orphan without a penny, brought him up with their own children and gave him a good education. Then simply to write and say he’d never set foot in the house again as soon as he came into money when he was at Oxford...’
‘Well, anyway, he’s done his thing. Been an academic success, I mean. It was a jolly good lecture. He’s had things published, too.’
Belinda picked up the Corbury Courier which she had let fall to the floor, and began to glance through it idly.
‘This Millenary racket seems to be catching on,’ she remarked presently. ‘Here’s a gorgeous letter about hearts beating in pride, and whatever. They ought to invite Blister, as his loving cousins called him, to come down and talk about Corbury’s past glories.’
‘For heaven’s sake, Belinda, don’t suggest anything of the sort to your father. Better not to mention that you’ve seen Bernard, in fact.’
‘O.K., O.K., Mummy. I know Blister’s a dirty word to Pop and Aunt Shirley. Listen! That’s Pop coming in, isn’t it?’
Buried in the Past Page 1
